Fair Measures Corporation is a nationally recognized management
training company made up of attorneys and professional speakers.
They consult with companies such as Oracle, Sun and Cisco around
preventing employee lawsuits by treating employees with respect.
Their Web site, at http://www.FairMeasures.com/ contains over
500 pages of free in-depth legal information and analysis,
provided for both employers and employees. It includes a monthly
e-newsletter, and an "Ask the Lawyers" page where visitors can
post additional questions. The site attracts frequent media
attention, and has been featured in "HR Magazine".
Last year (2000), we completely restructured the site to add
content for the many employees who come there looking for
information. Previously, we'd been concentrating on the
traditional markets for Fair Measures - human resource
professionals and managers who hire them for workplace training
programs. But we realized that in doing so, we were missing out
on a very different audience for their expertise - and one that
really only exists in the online context.
How did we know this? In two main ways:
1. by looking in our traffic analysis at the key search phrases
that brought visitors to the site; and
2. from the content of questions submitted to "Ask the Lawyers".
We could see that many visitors were looking for information
around sexual harassment, overtime exemptions, Internet e-mail
monitoring and privacy issues, and wrongful termination.
Employers wanted to know how to create policies and practices
that would protect them against costly lawsuits, and employees
wanted to enforce their rights.
So, we created a whole series of new products - instantly
downloadable online guides and sample policies around these
topics. They are available in Word, pdf, and html formats - at
the buyer's choice, and come with a full money back guarantee.
The price point - currently $10 for the guides, is intended to
encourage impulse purchases.
The latest of these products - a "Wrongful Termination Guide"
was added in April, and is now achieving a nearly 5% conversion
rate in sales. This is far higher than the average 1-2% that is
typical of most e-commerce sites (and perhaps indicative of the
current economic climate!) And, with real-time traffic analysis
from Hitbox, we are tweaking the language and length of our
selling pages to see what's most effective with each audience.
Our downloadable products are now generating a steady additional
revenue stream, from a source that is very different from the
traditional markets for this company.
So, lessons learned (and still being learned) from this exercise:
1. Be open to new and different potential audiences for your
online business; 2. Study your traffic analysis - there are many
valuable clues as to visitor needs that can be translated into
new products and services; and 3. Keep monitoring your visitor
response and try new spins on your content.
(c) 2001, Philippa Gamse
About the author:
Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is an internationally recognized
e-business strategist. Check out her free tipsheet "Beyond the
Search Engines" for 17 ideas to promote your Website:
http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be
reached at (831) 465-0317 or mailto:pgamse@CyberSpeaker.com
